A few days ago I stated that the internet adapts itself to art. With artists throwing their portfolios online and entire sites devoted to the spreading of different disciplines of art. But could the reverse also be true? That art adapts itself to the internet?
The thing that got me to posing this question was an interesting Wired feature I came across last week. The editors of the tech/lifestyle/art magazine featured a variety of art projects that would have been impossible without the intervenience of the internet. Take for example this one, I Want You To Want Me. An art installation which visualizes a load of profiles found on dating sites. In short there are a lot of balloons, the blue ones represent males and the pink ones females. The darker the balloon the older the person. It can switch between different modes and I’ll leave the rest of the details out. The creators of this project developed software which fetched information from a lot of dating sites and channeled this in an interactive art installation. Would this have been possible without the internet? Simply not. Because without the internet no online dating profiles and without those profiles no I Want You To Want Me.
But is it art? The wikipedia definition of art is: “Art refers to a diverse range of human activities and artifacts”, doesn’t help much. But the installation features a very neat visual design and it’s based on an original idea, so I think it can be concluded that it is. Lets call it digital art then. A new art discipline is born with the arrival of computers and the internet, neat. What else can be filed in this new category? Think photoshop art, ASCII art, pixel art and game art (probably there’s a whole lot more).
Thanks to the arrival of digitalism in our lives new possibilities in the field of art became possible. And with the rise of social community sites such as last.fm, del.icio.us and flickr massive amounts of information are being released in the public domain. Another art project featured in the same Wired article mentioned earlier deals with this. It goes by the rather dull name of Listening History. Lee Byron, the man behind it, designed an algorithm which grabbed a lot of listening data from last.fm. He managed to capture that in some graphs, not the casual Excel ones but rather customized, rather artsy graphs. For this project it can be said that the internet first created the ability for users to share, show, discover something (music in this case). And second a bright mind came along, grabbed the data and created a new piece of art.
But did art really change? Painters still use brushes to make paintings and bands still use drums to make their music, just like fourty years ago. However, it can be said that the internet opened a way with new possibilities which lead to new, experimental forms of art. So next to the old familiar art there’s new previously unseen art. Considering this, an interesting conclusion can be drawn. Social networks have only been in the mainstream for about four years, which means that there could be a lot more up ahead. Which is a potential source for new projects.
One Comment
well, at one point, Cavemen were beating on rocks with sticks and scratching on stone with sticks. everything has an evolution. as a trained musician, i scoff at the drummer and punkers who fret-wank but can’t read music. the irony is that the average music fan doesn’t know the difference. i assume its the same for art.